EASILY make your own LED LIGHT STRIPS! | A Beginners Guide to WLED

so a ridiculous amount of you have actually shown a ton of interest in how i control the leds on my rgb acoustic panels as well as the cable hider that's under my desk so i figured you know what i should probably uh go ahead and make a video uh to show you guys how it's done and how you can use it in your own gaming setup so i'm going to make a two-part video this video is going to be the easier uh solution the the way that you can actually make your own uh two meter strip for your gaming desk setup and you can you can make as many of these as you want it's going to go over the basics of what wled is uh how you can actually make your strip and uh it's going to have a lot of information on on making sure that you were using the correct parts because that is very very important last thing you want to do is go out and buy the wrong led strip that doesn't match up with the type of power supply that you use so this video may be a little bit long to some but please watch the whole video because it's going to go through detail for everything you need to know not just for the beginner uh video that we're going to do here but it's going to be part 2 as well for the more advanced section when you start adding a lot more leds all the way up to being able to run these on the roofline of your house and i've actually done that too so hang tight let me go over just a few things for you and we'll get rolling on this so first thing for this video we're going to do a quick two meter strip that i'm actually going to be using on another video i'm working on right now it is for my wife's gaming setup surprise birthday setup so check out that video as well when you're uh done watching this but also if you run into any problems while you're doing this i have started a new discord server the link is in the description below as well as all the other materials used for this video but please join the discord if you have any questions and you want some help on your own diy setup or a diy anything you want to post you want to flex your setup whatever the case may be please join the community again the link is in the description below so just a reminder this is the beginner's guide video part one of part two where i talk about more of the advanced stuff but you want to make sure that you listen to everything that i go into detail on on this video because it will help you out when we're dealing with longer led strips with power injections as well as 12 volt power supplies and all that so make sure you pay attention and with that being said let's show you how to make your own custom wled strip first let's talk about the basic components you have the individually adjustable led strips the dc power supply the esp8266 or esp32 development boards and the wled firmware that acts as the controller i'm going to explain what each of these do and the different types of compatibilities they have with one another we'll start with the brains the wled software and the esp8266 or esp32 development boards the esp8266 and esp32 modules are open source development boards with built-in wi-fi connectivity and are used in a wide variety of diy projects such as home automation and led controllers the esp8266 and esp32 are basically the same thing however the esp32 is newer smarter and faster so in this video we'll be using the esp32 wled is a free open source software that we will flash or upload onto the esp32 the program itself is controlled by the wled ios and android applications you find on your phone we'll get more into depth on setting this up later in the video but basically the esp32 connects to your home's wi-fi network you connect your phone to the same wi-fi network and just like magic you can then control your leds via the wled app [Music] now everyone knows what led strips are but there's actually a lot of different kinds types and styles there are individually addressable leds also known as digital rgb leds and then there are regular rgb leds known as analog leds analog rgb strips typically have a 4 pin connector and can only control a single color on a strip at any given time basically they're boring and if you want to control your leds with wled you'll need digitally addressable leds there are two different styles of leds you can purchase there are led string lights and led strip lights both styles work the exact same way and are compatible with wled but today we're going to focus on the led strip lights not all led strips are compatible with wled luckily for us you can find out which led strip types are compatible simply by going to the aircookie wled github site the link to this is in the video description here you can see the full list of compatible led strip types their voltage and various other comments you'll want to do your own research for the individual led strip types however the most common type used is the ws2812b for most of my projects and in our example today we'll be using this 5 volt ws 2812 b led strip that's 5 meters long and is 60 leds per meter i found these leds on amazon and by scrolling down it was very easy to locate the product's description the key things that you're going to need to look for are the following first the type as you can see this strip is a ws2812b led strip and is compatible with wled next the color order we'll get to this a little bit later but you'll need to make sure that you know this when configuring your strips inside the wled app next up the input voltage type these light strips require a 5 volt power source pretty simple if your led strips are 5 volt you'll need a 5 volt power supply and if you're using 12 volt leds then you'll need a 12 volt power supply the ip rating is basically just a measurement of protection that the strips will have against solid objects such as dust sand dirt and liquids most commonly you'll see led strips per cell with an ip rating of either ip30 or ip65 ip30 would be used in indoor applications where it wouldn't get wet and ip65 has a layer of silicone surrounding the led components that protects it from jets of water and can be used outside if installed properly the total pixel count on a strip is basically showing how close the pixels are to one another the closer together the brighter and more blended the lighting effects will have however more leds also means that it requires more power in the form of wattage or amperage probably the most important information you'll need is the led strips power consumption as well as the recommended power supply if it's there you'll use these to determine the wattage or amperage you'll need to power the leds okay so calculating the size of power supply that you'll need is probably the most confusing part for most people to grasp but i promise you it's really not that difficult to do and i'm going to simplify it the very best that i can for you by breaking it down into individual steps so here we go step one you need to identify how many leds per meter that your strip has easy enough to do this should be found right in the led's product description as shown in our example here as you can see there are 300 leds every 5 meters or 16.4 feet so with some simple math 300 leds divided by 5 meters equals 60 leds per meter step two identify how many leds you'll be using on your project for this tutorial i'm going to be installing leds around the back side of a desk that's part of a surprise setup overhaul video i'm doing for my wife the led strips that i bought are 5 meters long however for this project i'm only going to be using about 2 meters of it so since i'll be using 2 meters of led strip and there are 60 leds per meter i now know that i'll have a total of 120 leds and i can move on to step 3 which is identifying the power consumption of the leds usually this information will be located in the product's description in our example it's shown here and also shows the recommended power supply however keep in mind that this recommendation is for the full 16.4 feet or 5 meters of leds now we're only using 2 meters though so we need to look at the power consumption that is for each individual led and that is shown here for our calculation we'll use the 0.3 watts per led because this is the load when at the brightest white now that we have the total number of leds and we know what the power consumption is per led we can just multiply those together to get the total watts then to give yourself a buffer you'll want to follow the 20 rule and multiply this by 1.2 which comes out to 43.2 watts but power supply wattages come in multiples of 10 watts so in this case we'll need to round up and purchase a power supply that's at a minimum of 50 watts and to get your amperage you simply just divide your total watts which is 50 watts by the led's input voltage which is 5 volts and there you have it you need a 5 volt 10 amp power supply [Music] dc power supplies come in different output voltages amperages and styles most common output voltages will be either 5 volt or 12 volt it's important to match the correct power supply output voltage with the correct led input voltage basically never connect a 12 volt power supply up to a 5 volt led strip nothing good will come from it dc power supplies are measured in size by their amps or watts different styles of power supplies also matters there are three different power supply styles there's the wall adapters power bricks and metal enclosures wall adapter styles are typically used in lower wattage use cases such as one to two meter strips they range anywhere from one amp to three amps and have barrel connectors at the ends power bricks deliver more power than a wall adapter they're also a bit bulkier their power ranges between 5 amps and 15 amps and they also have barrel connectors metal enclosures deliver the highest wattage but these are typically hidden out of sight and not to be used in open public areas so for the rgb led panel that i have behind me as well as the cable hider that i have under my desk i have been using the metal enclosure power supply simply because it's out of the way and it can provide a lot more power than the others so i can do a lot more with it however for this video we're going to be using a brick power supply 5 volt 10 amp for the small led strip on my wife's setup now that you've got a better understanding of how it all works let's go ahead and flash the esp32 module with wled and show you how to wire it all up [Music] so what you'll need to do this is you need a usb cable your esp32 or esp8266 and the wled binary release code to get that code pretty easy we're just going to open up your browser and go to the air cookie wled github repository for these next steps you can find these links in the video description below once you're there you'll want to find the latest wled release and at this current time it's 0.11.1 before we click on that i want to show you the wled wiki page this page gives you a ton of different resources that may be useful such as this quick start guide that covers the wiring diagram and the initial setup for now we'll go back to the main page again and find the latest release click on the latest release and navigate to the correct binary file used for your esp module in this case we're using the esp32 so you'll want this one double-click to download and save to your computer we'll use this again in just a bit now in order to flash the esp32 with the wled binary file you just downloaded you'll need to download the esp home flasher tool a link to this again is in the description below navigate to the correct download link for your operating system and double click then open up the esp home flasher tool and then you'll take your usb cable and your esp32 go ahead and plug it in and then connect the other end to your computer then click on the refresh button here and find your device in the serial port drop-down if you're not sure which port is the correct port type in device manager in the windows start menu open it up and find your device under the ports drop down shown here select the correct serial port then click on browse and find the wled binary file that you downloaded earlier then select flash esp let this do its magic and when it's done it will display done flashing is complete okay so now that you've got it flashed onto your esp32 the next step is you need to connect to this through your network's wi-fi so what this does is this actually puts out a wi-fi signal then we need to connect to using either you can do your computer or i actually find it a lot easier just to use my phone to connect to it and we're going to program your home wi-fi network to this so the next time it connects it will be a device that's connected to your home's wi-fi network so you'll need to pull up your phone and jump into the settings go into your wi-fi settings and connect to the network that says wled ap this is the wled access point once connected the wled configuration screen will automatically pop up go ahead and hit wi-fi settings and then you're going to type in your home's network ssid and password then scroll down to the bottom and hit save and connect now go back to your wi-fi settings and connect your phone back to your home's wi-fi network now you need to download the wled app from either the apple app store or the google play store just search for wled in the search bar and it should pull up once you have it downloaded go ahead and open it up then click on the plus sign in the upper right corner now click on the discover lights button and once wled has found your esp32 module it will say found wled now hit the back button and you should see wled with the ip number that your network assigned it so you'll want to take that ip address that your network is assigned to it and you want to reserve the ip address what that does is it makes it to where every time your esp32 module tries to connect to the internet or connect to your home's network it always will connect to that ip address now this is something i can't actually help you out with you'll have to just easily jump in and google how to reserve an ip address for whatever router it is that you have and i'm sure you'll be able to find some easy instructions on how to do that but you'll want to make sure you do that because if you don't this will randomly change ip addresses and if it does then you'll open up the wled app and it won't try to connect it'll just say offline so make sure that you reserve the ip address we'll mess around with more of these settings after we do the wiring but first let's change the name of the esp32 to do that just click on where it says wled then go to configuration and then user interface then change the device's name where it says server description to whatever you want since this strip will be on my wife's new setup i'm changing it to wi-fi led now click save and go back to the main menu and it should be changed we'll mess around with more of these settings after we get it wired and configured but for now you can go ahead and disconnect it from the usb cable so it's no longer powered up and let's show you how to wire it all [Music] so again this is the basic setup for this easy two meter strip if you want to make your own links to everything will be in the description below and i will be doing in my part two video a little bit more condensed version of this but the the idea of it is the same so let's go over everything that we're going to use so first you're going to need your power supply this is a 5 volt 10 amp power supply with the barrel adapter and the terminal connections at the end you're gonna need your esp32 and your five volt led strips i've already cut these down to length to two meters so we're good to go you'll need some jumper wires a small flathead screwdriver and some wire strippers first we're going to connect the jumper wires to the esp32 so first we'll start with the red jumper wire this is the positive 5 volt wire you'll connect the female end of your red jumper wire to the vin pin on the esp32 like this then you'll connect the white jumper wire to the ground pin on the esp32 this is the negative voltage from your 5 volt power supply next you'll connect the green jumper wire to the pin that says d2 on the esp32 if you're using an esp8266 you'll connect it to the d4 pin this is the data wire this wire sends a signal to each of your leds on your led strip and tells them what color to turn and when now take your wire strippers and cut off the male ends of both the red and white jumpers then strip back the sheathing about a half inch to expose the copper you technically can also use t-splice connectors here but i found that they have poor connections so i just prefer going this route once you've got that done grab your led strips and strip back the red and white power injection wires the same way then twist the red positive voltage wire going to the esp32 to the red positive voltage wire going to the led strip simply cross them low at the base pinch them in the middle and twist until both are wrapped around each other then do the same thing with the white negative voltage wires now take the end of the green data jumper wire and insert it into the middle slot on the led strip header so it connects to the green wire that will send data commands to the individual leds then take your wire strippers and cut back the red and white power connections so they're only about a half a centimeter long then insert the red positive voltage wire into the positive screw terminal on the power supply's barrel adapter connector then tighten that down with your small screwdriver and do the same thing with the white negative voltage wire and negative screw terminal all right so now let's do a quick recap on how it all works because unless you know exactly how it works it really is useless in uh trying to expand on this for any other project so let's check this out you have your power supply outputting a 5 volt positive and negative charge from the end of the terminals that five volt charge is being sent to both the led strip and the esp32 now even though the led strip is receiving power it still doesn't know what color it should be and that's where the esp32 comes in because now that it's receiving power it can tell the led strip what color to change by sending commands through that green data wire so hopefully that helped make sense of it all now we're ready for the moment of truth let's plug it in and there you go to know that it's working correctly the first 30 leds should glow orange now to button it up nice and easy you can just use a cheap soap dish container to wad up these cables inside it i cut notches in the ends and i used a hot glue gun to keep the power supply wires in place so now that you've actually got it all powered up the next step that you're going to need to do is jump back into the wled app from your phone we need to uh set up a couple of things as you can see i have beautifully draped this led strip across the panel here and we're going to use that as the example here in a bit as you can see also it's only still doing that 30 leds so what we need to do is we need to make sure that it's going the entire length we know how many leds there are so we're gonna jump into wled here and we're gonna tell it how many leds there are and to do that you'll just open up the wled app again then go to the wled lights that you're working on in this case it's wifey led then go to config in the upper right and then select on led preferences and now just enter in the total led count of your strip you'll also want to scroll down to where it gives you the color order now remember earlier when i said you would need this this is where you need to make sure that the correct color order is selected in this case it is grb so we'll just make sure that we select grb and then we can go ahead and hit save as you can see all of the leds are lit and i think from here you can probably go ahead and just mess around with the wled app it's very easy to do it's got an easy color wheel here so you can just change it to whatever color you want drop it set it and it goes go blue goes blue very easy to do very intuitive you can also use a lot of the effects that it has so if we want to change it to say uh blink it will blink different colors or breathe is another one we can do here and breathe just does exactly what it looks like you do candle i mean there are tons and tons and tons of these things that you can actually do on here so i'm going to leave that part up to you and i'll talk about a little bit more in my next video coming up with the more advanced setup where this is a lot more condensed i do it a completely different way than this but this is the easy way to at least get you going and get you familiar with it and i totally think that you you should do it also i do want to kind of call out is i've been getting a lot of questions regarding the uh effects and everything that i use on my panels here and to be honest i just use the original effects that are in the uh that are in here the just the pre-programmed effects the way that they work so for instance i'm going to shut this one off and uh turn the other one on just like so and uh i'll show you give it a couple of little different things you can do so i've got different favorites on here that i've created with the different segments so i can change it to what i call uh this is a cyber neon that i created it's just a different color scheme um i've got cyberpunk it kind of goes uh blue and yellow on there or you can go uh pink blue fireworks this is the one you've seen in my videos so i just use the same presets but you can use these on all of them in fact i'll show you really quick on the uh the power strip this one so i'm just gonna jump in we're going to go into effects and uh i'm going to go ahead and change this up we'll do a blue and a red and then i'm going to jump into the effects here and change to uh let's do fireworks 1d now you can see that one strip is doing the same firework effect that the other one's doing and that's it pretty easy it is not very difficult to do and i really hope that you guys take this and do and make your own for your own setup uh the cost of this is very very very cheap those uh esp32 modules are roughly about around three to five dollars on the high end for them the led strips themselves are about 20 bucks and then you have to pay uh you know roughly depending on how much of a power supply you need it's roughly around uh 20 bucks or so give or take for the actual power strips or you can go the way that i did and you can get the uh the larger power supply where i can power literally everything it's about 30 for the metal enclosure that i use and that powers both these panels and the uh the uh hider that i have underneath my desk as well so you can kind of uh see where you could save a lot of money in in going this route rather than paying for the ridiculous amount that uh say govi has and and all that and you get very limited control where this you have so much control and there's so much more trust me so much more that you can do on this and it never fails to connect for me anyways i i haven't heard of a lot of people running to that issue but uh yeah so this is the wled beginner tutorial please stand by for the more advanced tutorial that i'm going to go into with segments and 12 volt and making these a lot more modular oh and also if you want if this is too difficult for you i highly recommend that you check out quinn led um i'm gonna send put the link in the description below but quinn led makes these very cool uh quinn dig uno is what they're called uh his own board that he's created it's very very neat they're they're roughly around uh 25 i believe to 45 if you get the additional one however or get the four channel one however those are out of stock very often i know he's trying to keep up with demand on those uh but if this is too complicated you can always buy your own individual one it just ramps up the cost so anyways we will see you next time stay tuned for the next video and thank you guys so much for watching and supporting my channel and my dream to be able to bring this kind of stuff to you we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: FLXtv

Views: 108,738

Keywords: led strip, wled tutorial, wemos d1, how to use wled, configure wled, smart home ideas, led strip lights installation, led strip lights, led strip lights ideas, wled light tutorial, wled app tutorial, rgb led strip controller, rgb led strip lights, rgb led strip pc, gaming setup ideas, gaming setup build, gaming setup tips, gaming setup transformation, gaming room setup ideas, gaming room setup, gaming room setup build, gaming room decor, gaming room accessories

Id: j15pjU3YZfg

Length: 27min 25sec (1645 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021